I still remember when a big phone meant a five-inch slab that barely fitted in my skinny jeans. Yes, the 2010s were a wild time.
Now, in early 2026, I’ve spent the past few weeks following the real-world launch of Samsung’s Galaxy Z TriFold and wondering if this is the turning point where foldables finally grow up, or if it could be the moment we collectively agree that foldables are trying to do too much. It’s too early to say for sure.
The Galaxy Z TriFold is here – sort of
What started as a wild concept is now an actual product, at least in some parts of the world.
Samsung’s first tri-fold phone, with two hinges and a tablet-sized inner display, went on sale first in South Korea in December 2025 before rolling out to markets like China, Taiwan, Singapore and the UAE, with the US getting the phone sometime in 2026 – in a very limited form, anyway.
Meanwhile, Europe – yes, that still includes us in the UK – is conspicuously absent from this first-gen TriFold release, making it feel even more like a glimpse at the future happening just over the horizon than something that’s here and ready for prime time.
And, let’s be honest, Samsung’s TriFold is unapologetically extra. Closed, it’s a thick brick; unfolded, it’s a sprawling screen that makes you rethink what ‘phone size’ even means.
On paper, it sounds like the sort of idea that should have died in a 2018 brainstorming session, but in practice, it hints at what might finally make foldables feel less like a party trick and more like a proper rethink of how a phone should look and feel in the hand.
Some of the best foldables around right now have focused mainly on turning your phone into either a smaller clamshell or a slightly bigger book, a la the Motorola Razr 60 Ultra and Honor Magic V5.
The TriFold’s ambition is bigger, offering the combination of phone, book-style foldable and proper tablet-size screens in one device, shapeshifting depending on your needs. Now that’s a foldable I want.
Embracing the absurdity
Let’s be honest, the TriFold is objectively ridiculous. It’s thicker and heavier than anything we’ve pretended to be okay with for years, the hinge engineering sounds like a mechanical nightmare, and there are more potential failure points than a group project at uni.
And let’s not forget the price tag either; in Korea, it launched at around the equivalent of $2,450, and you can bet that it’ll launch at a similar – or maybe even more expensive, given US import fees – price when it lands in the US later this year. Put simply, this isn’t the kind of phone you’ll casually pick up during the Black Friday sales.
And yet, smartphone history is full of ridiculous ideas that mature into something we all want and use on a daily basis. The first Galaxy Note looked like an in-joke with a stylus, while early smartwatches were glorified notification bracelets. Even the original Galaxy Fold felt like a concept that somehow slipped its trade show chains and made a break for the real world.
The TriFold sits firmly in that tradition. It’s something you can’t quite picture in your daily routine just yet, but that doesn’t mean it won’t get there eventually.
In fact, Samsung is explicit that this is a “pilot” product, with limited volume to test durability, software and real-world demand before it commits to a wider push – and that means the design is far from final.
The software reality check
Despite the fact that we’re talking about one of the first manufacturers to mass-produce a triple-folding phone, the hardware might actually be the easy part.
As we’ve seen from its other foldables, Samsung will no doubt continue to refine the hinges, thin the glass and trim the weight to make it nicer to wield on a daily basis. The real test is whether the software can keep up with all these configurations without making you want to frisbee the thing out of a window.
That’s not something Android foldables have traditionally been great at, though great strides have been made more recently.
And, let’s be honest, a tri-fold only makes sense if the UI actually adapts to what you’re doing.
Closed, it needs to deliver the standard smartphone experience; opened partway, it should feel like a comfortable book-style device for scrolling or reading; fully unfurled, it should behave like a mini laptop, with multi-window layouts, a responsive keyboard and apps that don’t freeze or restart when you move them from one pane – or size – to another.
Admittedly, Samsung’s years of tinkering with DeX, multi-window and foldable layouts give it a strong head start, but that doesn’t guarantee that third-party apps will play nicely. It’s an issue that still plagues regular book-style foldables, even after all this time.
If Samsung and other manufacturers can’t nail the software experience, foldables like the Galaxy Z TriFold risk becoming an incredibly expensive fidget toy; something very satisfying to open and close, and something that’ll impress your mates, but something that you’ll struggle to get on with on a day-to-day basis.
And that would be a shame because, for once, we’re looking at a foldable that genuinely tries to replace several gadgets, rather than just being a phone that bends because it can.
Don’t say goodbye to slab phones just yet
While the TriFold is certainly an exciting smartphone, I don’t think the slab phone will die off any time soon. The boring black rectangle has plenty of life in it, especially for people who just want WhatsApp, Instagram and tap-to-pay without babysitting a fragile, flexible display.
But now that the TriFold is on sale, even if only in a few regions, it feels like a line has been crossed. Foldables aren’t just here for show; they’re starting to seriously question what a phone should look like in five or ten years’ time.
Right now, the Galaxy Z TriFold is a wild, chunky, over-abitious experiment that most of us can’t buy and probably couldn’t justify if we could. Yet, I can’t shake the feeling that, a few years down the line, when folding, sliding and expanding screens are much more common, we’ll look back at this launch as one of those properly weird, but exciting, turning points.
Someone has to push the form factor right to the edge of what’s possible so we can find out what the future actually holds – and at the moment, it’s sitting in a handful of stores in Korea and a select few other countries, hidden behind two very expensive hinges.
